by Brad Willis
The book is titled Awakening the Spine by an Italian Yoga teacher named Vanda Scaravelli. The cover has an illustration of a female figure in an amazing back bend with one leg extended straight into the air. Her alignment is defined with geometric circles and triangles, like a takeoff on Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous illustration entitled Vitruvian Man. It’s mesmerizing. I hold the book in my hands as if it’s made of gold, feel its weight, study the front and back covers, thumb the pages, and gaze at the pictures. Although Scaravelli is in her eighties, there are photos of her in breathtaking poses, including one where she’s lying on her back with both feet behind her head. Even in these impossible contortions, she looks serene and completely at peace. I’m awestruck.
My limited understanding is that Yoga is all about these poses. I’m surprised when I read the foreword and find it’s something much deeper. The focus of the book is the artful design of the human body, honoring the spine and moving it in its natural directions, listening for inner wisdom, and approaching life as a spiritual experience. Scaravelli names her internationally renowned Yoga teachers: Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, T.K.V. Desikachar, and B.K.S. Iyengar. They’re names I’ve never heard before and couldn’t begin to pronounce, but I’m intrigued and want to know more about this world and these people who are so accomplished.
The book also has a brief summary of the history of Yoga, how it arose thousands of years ago in India as a complete spiritual science and formula for balanced living. Even though I’ve only had two sessions with Savita, and they focused on body, breath, and mental relaxation, I’m immediately sold on the idea of a spiritual science. It’s the perfect complement to Dr. Miller’s insights about harmonizing body, mind, and Soul in his Deep Healing book, and it convinces me beyond any doubt that Yoga is the next step of my journey.
It doesn’t even bother me that Awakening the Spine contains no instructions for Yoga postures as I had hoped and anticipated. I’m so transfixed that I read almost half the book before dinner arrives. Yoga has it all: healing exercise, breath work, meditation, nutrition, philosophy, and spiritual practice. I continue reading as I gobble my steak, underlining important passages and jotting down references to other Yoga books as I go. After dinner, I ring Sandra at the concierge desk. “I need more books sent overnight again, please. Oh, and is there any way to find a few scented candles, a box of incense, and a CD of some soft Yoga music?”
“I know just what you need,” she answers cheerily. “There’s a shop near my home that carries those sorts of things. I’ll pick them up before I come to work tomorrow and bring you a receipt.”
“Thank you so much, Sandra,” I say as I feel another spontaneous smile break out on my face. I think I’ve smiled more in the past two days than I have in a year.
After finishing the Scaravelli book and digesting my dinner, I place a towel down on the carpet in the living room and get into my stilted version of a cross-legged seated posture with the couch supporting my rounded back. I close my eyes and concentrate on my spine, especially the fulcrum point above my sacrum. I begin deep three-part Yogic breathing now, and, like Dr. Miller suggests in his audiotapes, visualize that I’m sending healing light to every vertebra and disc. As I move slowly into the beginning twists Savita taught me, then the forward fold, I pay much more attention to my physical alignment and mental awareness. The deep pop in my spine comes again, softer this time, yet just as soothing and healing.
I don’t think I can get my legs up the wall without assistance, so I modify the posture by lying down on the carpet and swinging my legs onto the couch with my knees bent. Breathing deeply now while silently chanting I am calm, healthy, strong, and relaxed, I ponder Scaravelli’s words about listening to my inner wisdom and approaching life as a spiritual experience. I’m not sure how to go about this, but I’m certain the epiphany I experienced when I first stepped into the Yoga room at the Pain Center was a message from that inner wisdom. As I relax more deeply, my stress melts away. My body feels like warm honey. A palpable sense of peace surrounds me. This is when I slip into a deep sleep.
Southern California’s spring is in full blossom. It’s been three weeks since my first Yoga class with Savita and I’ve become a complete fanatic. The coffee table in my hotel suite is now a Yoga altar, with scented candles, incense, and Yoga books surrounding the magic drawing stick like it’s a sacred talisman. I’ve bought my first Yoga mat and given it a permanent place on the floor in front of the altar. I’m up earlier every morning now, making it a point to see the sunrise and send Morgan my love through its golden light. I practice gentle poses, deep breathing, meditation, and relaxation for a full hour, then study my books before having breakfast and going to the Pain Center.
My latest Yoga book has dozens of beginning poses with details on their therapeutic values and specific instructions on proper alignment for each posture. I’m surprised to learn that the poses—called Asanas in Sanskrit, the ancient Indian language traditionally used in Yoga—are not exercises. Exercise happens as a result of performing them, but they are more like a natural form of medicine. Some poses stimulate and energize the cardiovascular and neurological systems. Other poses calm them down. Different Asanas compress and detoxify the organs, open and align the spine, ignite an inner fire of energy and power, or soothe and heal painful emotions.
I attempt to do every one of the poses in the book, but most remain far beyond my capacity. Still, I continue to feel subtle shifts and openings throughout my body with the poses I am able to get into. I breathe deeply and fully almost every waking moment now, sending healing energy into my spine and lower back muscles. My mantras, Get up, Daddy and I am calm, healthy, strong, and relaxed, flow on almost every breath cycle, like Yoga poses for my normally agitated mind. This keeps me in the present moment. Really here. Not constantly thinking about the past or the future, my thoughts galloping in all directions like wild horses in a frenzy. This is it.
It’s only been a month of Yoga, yet as I walk briskly from the parking lot toward the Pain Center on a Monday morning in late March, I feel like I’m becoming a new person. I am smiling. Feeling vibrant and energized. My cane and back brace are long gone, my gait is lighter and more confident, there’s color in my face. I’m getting stronger and more mobile, and feeling a sense of hope and optimism for the first time in years. As I pass the detox center, I hear a shout from some of my old colleagues sitting on the courtyard benches waiting for their meetings. “Hey, what happened to you?”
“What do you mean?” I ask, wondering if I’ve done something wrong.
“You were walking dead a month ago,” one of them says with wide-eyed surprise. “But now no body brace, no cane. You really look healthy. What’s your secret?”
“Yoga,” I answer with a smile. “I’m up in the Pain Center on the third floor over there,” I say, pointing to the wing of the building beyond the residential area. “Stay with the residential program, but find a way to get into the center and do Yoga, too. It can change your life. I really mean it. It’s not just helping my back, it’s helping my mind, and it’s connecting me with something deeper inside.”
“Yoga!” They say it unison with a few laughs, thinking I must be stoned on morphine again.
“No thanks,” one says as he takes a deep drag on his cigarette, “I don’t want any part of what’s deep inside of me.”
“I can barely get out of bed in the morning,” another says with a dismissive grunt followed by a gulp of black coffee.
If only I could get through to them, convince them that Yoga could help them achieve greater balance, relieve their mental torment, and find some inner peace. I sense it isn’t possible, just as it wasn’t for me when I met the young Yoga teacher at my fiftieth birthday party whose wise advice seemed so foreign and irrelevant to my circumstances. Plus, I’m no Yoga expert. I’m as green as they come. Who am I to advise anyone?
“It’s good to see you,” I say, moving along. “I have to go now. Have a great day.”
A
s I walk across the wide lobby toward the elevators, the inner voice I’ve been hearing more from lately whispers Take the stairs. The Pain Center is two flights up, and I still feel intimidated every time I see the stairwell during my Physical Therapy walks down the hallway. I ignore the voice and head for the elevator, then stop in my tracks and remember: This is exactly the voice I need to heed. “Okay, let’s do it,” I say, talking out loud to myself again as I head toward the stairs. I pause at the bottom and gaze up the stairwell. It looks like a mountain. I take a few deep breaths to release the fear, close my eyes, and visualize myself floating effortlessly up, like I’m ascending into Heaven.
Okay.
Here we go.
Breathing deeply.
Chanting “Get up, Daddy,” with each step.
Moving slowly and rhythmically.
Staying focused.
Keeping my spine aligned.
Finding little bits of new muscle in my legs and back.
Being strong, healthy, calm, and relaxed.
I’m hyperventilating by the time I reach the top of the first flight. My heart is pounding, I’m dripping with sweat, and my thighs are on fire. I want to give up and crawl to the elevator. Wait. Relax. Stay focused. I pause. Deepen my breath. Release tension wherever I can find it. Get up, Daddy. Now, even more slowly and mindfully, I breathe and chant my way up the final flight. As I step into the hallway of the Pain Center, I imagine how exhilarated Sir Edmund Hillary must have been when he climbed Mount Everest. I feel so empowered I want to scream to the whole world, I am alive!
“I just walked up the stairs from the ground floor!” I announce to PJ like it’s a news bulletin as I turn the corner into Physical Therapy, so proud of myself I’m bursting at the seams.
“That’s wonderful!” PJ exclaims with maternal affirmation. “How about lying down for a few minutes with an ice pack before we get started?” She’s a saint. It’s the greatest suggestion I’ve ever heard.
The medications I took for so many years not only clouded my mind, they slowed and clogged my digestive system. Given all the physical pain, I no longer exercised. Rarely walked. Often, rarely moved. Yet I kept eating and drinking like a foreign correspondent, slowly gaining a ton of weight. Several of the Yoga poses I’m now doing, especially the twists, feel like they are detoxifying, energizing, and toning my organs and digestive system. At the same time, I find I’m satisfied with smaller portions of food. And there are no more nightly glasses of wine or bottles of beer. As a result, even though I’m still far too heavy, the excess weight is now pouring off. I can even see the veins in my puffy arms for the first time in years.
I’ve been wearing sweatpants and T-shirts ever since I entered detox, and they’re getting baggier by the day. Just for fun this morning, I tried on the size forty-two khaki trousers I brought to the hotel with me. They slipped off my hips and fell to my knees. Hurrying down to the spa, I stepped on the scale. I’m down to 205 pounds. Twenty pounds less than the day I checked into the McDonald Center a little more than three months ago. This afternoon, I navigated the walkways behind the hotel and found my way to a fashion mall to buy a new pair of slacks and smaller sweatpants: waist size thirty-eight!
Despite my attempts not to think about cancer, there are daily reminders. I barely produce any saliva as a result of the radiation toasting my salivary glands, and my mouth is usually so dry I have to drink water in order to swallow my food. My throat gets sore now and then. Sometimes it bleeds. When these conditions arise, I whisper the Serenity Prayer, asking myself to accept those things I cannot change. Then I do everything possible to block it out before it overwhelms me.
The prayer also asks for the courage to change the things we can. This is where Yoga comes in. Maybe I can’t change the outcome of stage IV cancer, but I’ve already made a major shift in my level of physical pain, and it feels like a new beginning. I keep devouring Yoga books and ordering more. I take notes, earmark pages, highlight passages, try every practice and technique I can handle. I no longer lie on the couch during my breaks at the Pain Center. I get on the floor and do little twists, forward folds, gentle backbends, and lateral extensions. It’s a complete obsession.
The twists and forward folds are the ones Savita taught me our first day. For the back bends, I simply hold onto my knees while I’m cross-legged, lift my chest forward and up, and then open my shoulders as I extend my head up and back. The lateral extensions involve placing my right hand on the ground out to my right side, then reaching my left arm overhead and extending it diagonally to the right. This lets me breathe deeply into my left ribs as my spine arcs sideways. Then I repeat the pose on the other side. With these simple postures, I’m moving my spine in all directions. Massaging the discs. Enhancing blood flow. Breathing into the spaces. Releasing years of tightness and tenderness.
It’s still painful for me to sit cross-legged without back support, but my knees have come down a little from my armpits. I can swing my legs up the wall now with ease, no longer a bend in my knees from tight hamstrings. I’m able to hold an alternate arm-leg balance for a full minute on each side now without collapsing. In forward folds, my lower back keeps extending slightly farther, creating more spaciousness. In every pose, I can feel energy moving in long-dormant areas, my spine realigning and slowly healing. It’s like I finally have a grip on life and am climbing out of the abyss, moving from darkness into the daylight. It feels incredibly empowering, even though I know there’s still such a long way to go.
There’s a network of beautifully landscaped walkways and bridges behind the Marriott Hotel that wind through several city blocks. I’ve started exploring them in the mornings and evenings. Watching the trees and shrubbery bud and blossom as spring approaches. Listening to the birds. Pausing to feel the sun on my face and gentle breezes on my cheeks. Nature, I’m reminded by Dr. Miller’s teachings, is incredibly healing. I knew this intuitively when I escaped Southern California as a teenager and moved into the woods. Then, caught up in my career, I forgot. Now it’s coming back to me more deeply than ever. The more I align myself with nature’s rhythms, the better I feel.
After so many years of stagnation, I’m also being called to rhythms of creative expression. During college I lived for a year in a large home with several folk musicians. They would gather in our living room almost every evening, playing guitars and sharing songs. I wanted to play, too, but being left-handed I couldn’t use their instruments. Finally, I found an old left-handed guitar, and my friends taught me to strum a few chords so I could play along. I never had a lesson or became very proficient, but it always soothed me. Especially when I played alone late at night in my room. I could feel the vibration of the strings inside my body. See the energy of the sounds dancing through the candlelight. Sense a river of peace flowing through my veins.
Left-handed guitars, which are built upside down and backwards, are hard to find. But Sandra, my intrepid concierge, has come through again and found me a beautiful left-handed acoustic guitar with deep and rich tones. At night, after sunset and my evening Yoga practice, I light a candle in the darkness of my hotel room and gently strum chords and fingerpick simple notes I’ve learned from listening to my new Yoga CDs. Most of the melodies and progressions are droning and repetitive, creating an ethereal sense of meditation.
It’s more than music to me. Each sound is a soothing prayer that harmonizes every cell in my body, especially when I chant “OM” while I strum. My books teach me that om, which is drawn out when chanted and sounds like aaaa-uuuu-mmmm, is the primary mantra of Yoga and the eternal sound of the cosmos—some say OM is the sound the universe made when it came into existence. The Bible says, “In the beginning was the word.” Yoga says the first word, or sound, was OM. Chanting it creates an inner vibration that connects me with my Soul.
CHAPTER 30
Closure
A HAND REACHES OUT and touches my shoulder as I’m walking through the hospital courtyard one afternoon. “Excuse me, my name is Richar
d. I think you’re the person some friends have told me about who is healing a broken back with Yoga?”
“Yes, that’s me,” I answer with a smile, feeling a sudden sense of worth, like I have something to offer someone in need. “It’s really helping me. You should check it out.”
Richard looks like an avant-garde European movie star, with dark eyebrows, piercing green eyes, and a thick shock of blond hair falling across one side of his face. But his lean, athletic body is twisted in pain. He limps on a badly damaged ankle and holds his head tilted unnaturally to one side. Richard shares with me that he was chief executive of a hi-tech company, with a wife, two children, and a beautiful home in one of San Diego’s most exclusive neighborhoods. He was also under great stress and dealt with his demons by drinking himself into a stupor every night.
He had endless drunken outbursts in front of his family, and numerous drunk-driving arrests. Then one morning, Richard woke up in a roadside ditch with a broken ankle, fractured shin, and wrenched neck. He had no idea where he was or how long he’d been there. When he finally got to a hospital, where his wounds were treated and he sobered up, Richard discovered his drinking had cost him everything. His beloved Mercedes sports car was in the wrecking yard.
His company’s board of directors had fired him. A restraining order forbid him from returning home.
Having had plenty of psychological turmoil myself, I can see that Richard harbors deep insecurities and emotional wounds. It’s etched in his face and even more evident when he speaks. His words are fraught with fear and anger. He vacillates between hope and despondency. But his intelligence and charisma manage to shine through his suffering and darkness. Despite his desperation and vulnerability, there’s something inside of him that makes me think he has a real chance to pull it together.